Older blog entries for olandgren (starting at number 197)

School

Ok, I spoke to soon about classes going well. Combinatorics is going to destroy my soul if I'm not careful. *sigh* Why am I so bad at advanced math?

Hacking

Not much, sadly. Live, learn, and go on...

Life

So it's V-day, the most miserable day of the year to be single. Once again, it's nothing more than a sunny Thursday for me. *sigh* My parents are getting increasingly desperate about the fact that I've been supremely unsuccessful on the meat market. I'm not normally that cynical about it, but I guess in the end that's what it really comes down to. People might like your personality, share common interests, and enjoy your hobbies, but when it comes down to it you still end up as nothing more than a friend because they're just not physically attracted to you. Friends is fine, I'm just wondering why I seem to never find one where there's actually chemistry.

Oh, well. Enough being bitter for me for today.

Listening

Pulp - Common People

I wonder if I should be dumping these in a div tag so I can extract a "What was I listening to then" history from this diary in a couple of years?

School

Classes are going well. We turned in an excellent paper for the Math modeling competition. The model itself that I wrote was not exactly the most wonderful thing in the world, but it provided us with some numbers to put into the report. Stochastic modeling is fun. Other than that, I now have a LOT of reading and homework to do to catch up. Such is life.

Hacking

Well, not really hacking precisely. First I thought that the CPU fan was the problem. Then I thought that the power supply was the problem, so I got a nice new one from Enermax. Still makes the noise once in a while. It doesn't appear to be the fan on the video card, since when I change the pressure on that fan the noise doesn't change. Rargh. Very frustrating.

Edit: Hah! I decided, genius that I am, to unplug the vid. card fan while it was running to better test my hypothesis. It's the videocard fan, alright. Sheesh. All that work for nothing.

It will be nice to go to work today and just program Perl for 5 hours. It's been a while since I've gotten to do that, and I think I may have forgotten how much fun it really is to be able to use a language with no restrictions other than the ones in your head. I wish I could remember where on the Net I found this, but it's funny all the same

Perl is the only Bondage and Discipline language that has safewords.

Life

I got to know a couple of people much better as part of the competition. Both Stephen and Erla are a lot of fun. Erla was completely not what I would expect in a female computer science major, but it was a welcome wakeup call that not all people interested in CS are necessarily squares like me who can rhapsodize about their desire for closures in a programming language. So hopefully I can keep that up, if for no other reason than she cracks me up.

Stephen is another example of the ways in which I've screwed up at college. He was in my firstyear course freshman year, has been in various other classes, is friends with one of my friends, and yet somehow I've never managed to be more than an friendly acquaintance with him. I put the blame for that one squarely on my own shoulders. Anyway, he's great. The man is the master of the deadpan line.

Other than that, it's time to repair my rather fragmented social life. The combination of having a bad week(and thus never seeing anyone) with the competition has pretty much toasted my knowledge of what's going on in friends lives, and I feel out of touch and alone. Probably a precursor to next year, but whatever.

Other than that, not much is going on. The dreaded day of Saint Valentine approaches and once again I'm bereft of the ability to give flowers to anyone. I want to be able to actually use my knowledge, dammit. What's the use of knowing that you give yellow roses(to another American) to someone you regard as a friend but can't actually give them because society requires that flowers --> significant other. Feh.

For those curious, yellow roses mean two different things depending on which side of the tub you're on. Americans tend to interpret them as friendship, where in Europe they're jealousy.

Listening

Boards of Canada - Rue the Whirl

School

God, I love my classes. They're just a lot of fun. I spent most of this evening doing Networks homework -- en totale, about 300 lines of Java, and a working framework that we can turn in for the first assignment. Always a happy thing.

Tomorrow evening at 7:00, the most intense 4 days in a long time start. It's the annual math modeling competition, and I decided that it was a lot of fun last time, so I'd do my part and try it again. I've got a good team, but it's scary as I'm the primary implementor. Guess I'll have to walk the walk.

Hacking

Lots of more sysadminy stuff -- setting up environments and the like. The PS on my Linux box decided to go flaky on me, so I need to fix that up. Have been following but not doing too much with the new SCSH release. The recent discussions on source-code control mechanisms have been interesting, and I downloaded and played around with Perforce. BitKeeper is next on the list, followed closely by arch. I should probably also rebuild myself a new Subversion client.

Do you ever notice that it's the little things that torque you off the most? I discovered that on my Windows box, ssh2 doesn't authenticate via keys. So I don't have auto-commit and the like to the CVS repository, which means I can't use PCL-CVS mode in emacs, which translates to one frustrated developer. I never quite realized how important being able to do that was.

Tomorrow is the acid test -- I go into work and find out whether there has been massive breakage of my CGI scripts. I guess there hasn't been something critical, since I didn't get email.

Life

It goes. Social life is a bit weird right now. No more car: parents reclaimed it. Twas fun while it lasted. Now taking tetracycline to fight my systemic acne in addition to using Differin. Maybe this will clear stuff up. Agonizing over whether I should interview with Microsoft tomorrow -- I know Java really well, C++ marginally, and C I can read. Thus, the chances of my being productive are extremely good. There are other factors, though. I guess I'll interview and see.

Listening

Mozart - Violin Concerto No. 5 in A Minor

Hacking

Well, of a sort. My first piece of production code went into use today. Let's see how long it takes for them to break it. It's not the first code that I've written that's in something important, but it is the first code that I and I alone am responsible for. Which, to me, is a big deal, because anything that's wrong with it I pay for.

Not that a set of three CGI scripts that set and remove vacation messages and forwarding is really a big deal, but I worked really hard on them, and I'd like to think that I did a good job.

School

Whee. Back in the groove, as much as there is a groove to school. I have an awesome set of classes. Design of computer networks should be interesting, my senior seminar in programming languages is 3 other guys, me, and the professor, which is just amazing. I mean, it doesn't get any better than essentially being able to sit down and talk with the professor about my favorite subject for an entire semester. I can't imagine a better prep for working in that subject in grad school. Economics of Gender should be a very interesting class once I remember the rest of my basic Econ. The stuff we did for International seems to be a non-intersecting set, so I guess the classes will have very different focus. Finally, I've got Combinatorics, which should be a good, if rather scary class. The class is scary because it has basically all of the usual suspects in the junior and senior class in the Math department, barring a few people who took it as sophomores. I'm very, very intimidated -- I'm used to being one of the better people in the class, and here I'm on the lower end of the curve.

Work

Talked to my co-worker and it sounds like they're making some progress, which is a happy thing.

Diet

Dropped a little, though snacking tonight will probably haul me right back up. Of real interest is the fact that I'm now taking a class in "Step Aerobics", which proved to be a very good workout. I'm also the only guy in the class, which was intimidating as hell. But the regular exercise will be good for me, especially if I can control my eating.

Life

Whee. I think one of the best things about life is that you get to live it and it's always interesting and exciting and just generally neato. It looks like the girl I was interested in is getting back together with her ex-boyfriend. She was riding him around and calling him her "little horsie" last night, which sorta makes you wonder. *shrug* She and her roommate Julia are both a lot of fun to talk to and relax around, so it doesn't really matter either way. I figure I could give it one more shot to see if she's interested in something more, and if not that's life.

I've been thinking a lot about what I want out of life as part of finishing this Goldwater scholarship(the various parts of which are still being shipped to the Academic Programs department for review) and I realized that I'm probably going to end up a very lonely person in a year or two. So many of my friends are scattering out across the world, and remote communication is one of the things that I'm really bad at. I guess I'll just have to get better at it -- I want to be seeing these people for a long time to come.

Let's see, what else? My crush on Katrina popped up again, so I've got some stomping to do there, but it's not nearly as nasty as the first couple of times for the twin reasons of maybe someone else out there and knowing as an absolute that there's no way she's interested. The silly thing just doesn't know when to quit. I think it's her eyes. She has really pretty eyes that go from grey to blue-green depending on mood and clothing, and you sorta get sucked in. Eh -- enough of that.

CPU fan on my Linux box is in the process of dying, so it's dead to the world until I can get ahold of a replacement. I'm tempted to just drive down to Best Buy and crack out for one right this instant, but I should probably do some research as to what the quality brands are and pick one up off the net. Very frustrating.

Thinking really hard about why I never seem to be any good at finishing long-term projects and what this means for my future. Also thinking a great deal about my habits and roles that I automatically assume, and whether they're perpetuating the oppressive white male hegemony.

Yes, I really am thinking about that. Too much time on my hands, perhaps?

Listening

Lovage - Book of the Month

School

Being dropped into a pressure cooker(at least by Honeywell standards) has its disadvantages. I basically got nothing done because I was burned out when I got home. My professor had her baby, so that's good -- hopefully I can make it up to her over the coming semester.

Work

Well, that was an intense two weeks. Anybody want someone who has intimate knowledge of the open source ACE/TAO CORBA infrastructure? It's good stuff to know, but it went down the pipes right quick. Configuring their build system is an iron-plated bitch, and the code tests the limits of even the sturdiest of compilers(which the GCC targeted at VxWorks is most emphatically not). But it was a really good experience and I made a little cash.

Diet

Have more or less been spinning my wheels. Weighed a little less this morning, but anything over 180 still needs a lot of improvement.

Life

As predicted, I spent lots more time BSing with Isaiah than actually working on things like the Goldwater scholarship. It got done, though, which is the good part. It's really nice to see people back -- I got to eat supper with Lilly, and that was a lot of fun to have her back.

I'm really looking forward to the next couple of days. There's the stress of preparing for school, but there's also the sort of tranquil knowledge that I know exactly what to expect from the next 3 to 4 months in terms of social life, academic life, and everything else. Of course, having said that, fate will now no doubt throw me one mother of a curveball, but if that happens I'll be interested in seeing where it goes.

Listening

Cocteau Twins - Treasure - 04 - Persephone

School

Not much progress. Work has been sucking me into a pit of distraction. I'm tired when I get home. How very odd, work is actually hard!

Work

Got hired on sorta at crunch time. This should be very interesting, since I'm sorta the domain expert at the task I'm doing, and thus if we don't get it done in time it will more or less be my fault. Ugh.

Diet

Weight seems to be consistent, but I've been slipping the past couple of days. Time to reaffirm the commitment. I need to get it through my head that if I get the pain over now, then later on things will be much easier. Hard concept to make a growling tummy grasp, though.

Life

I'm not very good at planning ahead. Which is going to be something of a debilitating weakness if I don't improve drastically in fairly short notice. Otherwise, the honors project will destroy me and I'll end up the laughingstock of the department.

Had a long BS session with Isaiah about how you need to be yourself. Yeah, I'm a little(ok, a lot by most standards) square, and perhaps a little more gentlemanly than is strictly necessary, but life goes on.

School

K-nearest neighbor is pretty fun. I've got a simple version(1-nearest neighbor) almost done, and I'm going to upgrade it to a specified k-nearest neighbor shortly. I'm just doing it with a toy implementation right now, but it should be easy enough to transfer over -- all I need to change is how I calculate the value of a record.

Hacking

Attempt at coding in C was a total failure. Oh, well. I tried. Downloaded the new version of scsh, which looks pretty damned cool. It's going to be fairly tricky to go back to writing scripts in something other than scheme once I get used to it. Oh, well. The things we do for love of a language.

Going to look at the wherewithall it takes to set up an icecast server so that I can access my music collection at work without having to download everything. It's nice to have music so that I can code.

Diet

Wow, does it ever suck. I've been able to stick fairly close to it, with the exception of the lunch at Chipotle yesterday. I couldn't really refuse, since it was a parent's friend. Celery and lettuce are my friends. You can get an entire bunch of celery or an entire head of iceberg lettuce for a buck, and about half of either will stifle pizza cravings.

Life

I've been spending a lot of time BSing with my roommate Isaiah. It's a lot of fun just being able to chat with someone about life, the universe and everything. He's one of those people who's really open and basically lets you know what's on his mind all the time, so the conversations never fail to be interesting.

Diet Coke with Lemon is actually quite yummy.

Listening

Dan the Automator -- Music to Make Love to Your Old Lady By
It's actually quite interesting. It's sorta semi-downtempo with a lot of spoken word stuff done over the top. Quite relaxing, but not exactly something that I would want to listen to at work.

School

Currently implementing a customized version of K-nearest neighbor for my professor. It's sorta slow going -- I'm not very good at algorithm translation from procedural to functional.

Hacking

Cluttered up the Subversion dev list a little with a library linkage problem I was having with the new version of Berkeley DB. It doesn't seem to want to link in automatically. Very sad. I also started reading the code to fix one of the bite-sized tasks. It's not the easiest going in the world, as I'm used to other languages than C, but it's starting to make sense with enough staring at it. I decided to go through and annotate it with newbie comments, and that seems to be helping a little. If I don't have C better in hand by the beginning of the semester I'm probably going to be in trouble.

Diet

It sucks, a lot. But I'm surviving and hopefully a downward trend will start in a few days. I've worked out the past couple and that's gone well, even if it has been rather tiring. I'm out of shape. *sigh*

Life

Sorta lonely, which is weird because most of my friends are back but I feel like I can't go see them because I'll just do more damage to already fragile relationships. Maybe it's just a side-effect of dieting. I don't know. I just can't talk to people like I used to -- I don't know why. Very frustrating.

Back to trying to grok the Subversion source code. I could solve the problem right now if I knew how to figure out whether a path was present on the filesystem or not. Guess it's time to go hunting for clues and activities.

Life

Note to self: Just don't open your mouth. Your comment license has been revoked.

Her: Describes harrowing New Year's Eve. Really, really bad mojo. I've only come close to that kind of thing once in my life.
Me: "At least you had more fun than I did."

God, I'm an asshole sometimes. I got called for it, but I still wish there was a way I could apologize. Why do I always do stuff like that to the people I care about the most? It seems like my brain and mouth are never connected when they need to be these days.

Oh, and I weighed 190 today. Fuck. My license for food has been revoked for the next month or two as well.